Hot Topics:

A secret group bought the ingredients for a dirty bomb -- in the U.S.

The Lowell Sun

Updated:
08/04/2016 12:23:53 PM EDT

Large quantities of radioactive materials stored in a single location, like these at an oil well-logging storage site, are particularly vulnerable to theft for use in a dirty bomb, the Department of Energy and the Government Accountability Office determined. (National Nuclear Security Administration photo)

The clandestine group's goal was clear: Obtain the building blocks of a radioactive "dirty bomb" - capable of poisoning a major city for a year or more - by openly purchasing the raw ingredients from authorized sellers inside the United States.

It should have been hard. The purchase of lethal radioactive materials - even modestly dangerous ones - requires a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a measure meant to keep them away from terrorists. Applicants must demonstrate they have a legitimate need and understand the NRC's safety standards, and pass an on-site inspection of their equipment and storage.

But this secret group of fewer than 10 people - formed in April 2014 in North Dakota, Texas and Michigan - discovered that getting a license and then ordering enough materials to make a dirty bomb was strikingly simple in one of their three tries. Sellers were preparing shipments that together were enough to poison a city center when the operation was shut down.

The team's members could have been anyone - a terrorist outfit, emissaries of a rival government, domestic extremists. In fact, they were undercover bureaucrats with the investigative arm of Congress.

And they had pulled off the same stunt nine years before. Their fresh success has set off new alarms among some lawmakers and officials in Washington about risks that terrorists inside the United States could undertake a dirty bomb attack.

Advertisement

Here's how they did it: In Dallas, they incorporated a shell company they never intended to run and rented office space in a nondescript industrial park, merely to create an address for the license application. In a spot on the form where they were supposed to identify their safety officer, they made up a name and attached a fake résumé. They claimed to need the material to power an industrial gauge used in oil and gas exploration.

Last year, their application was sent not to Washington but to Texas regulators, who had been deputized by the NRC to grant licenses without federal review. When the state's inspector visited the fake office, he saw it was empty and had no security precautions. But members of the group assured him that once they had a license, they would be able to make the security and safety improvements.

So the inspector, who always carried licenses with him, handed them one on the spot.

The two-page Texas document authorized the company to buy the sealed radioactive material in an amount smaller than needed for any nefarious purpose. But no copies were required to be kept in a readily-accessible, government database. So after using the license to place one order, the team simply made a digital copy and changed the permitted quantities, enabling it to place a new order with another seller for twice the original amount.

"I wouldn't call what we did very sophisticated," Ned Woodward, the mastermind of the Government Accountability Office's plot, said in a phone interview with the Center for Public Integrity. "There was nothing we had done to improve that site to make it appear as if it were an ongoing business."

In 2007, Woodward's colleagues in the GAO similarly set up fake businesses, got licenses to purchase low-level radioactive material and altered them to buy larger quantities. The NRC promised "immediate action to address the weaknesses we identified," according to the GAO's report on that incident.

The auditors' aim this time around was to see whether the government had cleaned up its act and taken steps to close some simple gateways to obtaining the ingredients for a dirty bomb.

It turns out, the government had not.

While the purchases that Woodward's team set in motion were never completed, if they had been, his group would have had enough radioactive material to create the type of dangerous dirty bomb that terrorists may seek, according to David Trimble, director of Natural Resources and Environment at the GAO and Woodward's boss. It would have been within the group's reach to spread cancer-causing americium and beryllium dust over many blocks, threatening the health of anyone who breathed it.

The quantity each seller could have sent was dangerous, and together the quantity was "significantly dangerous," Trimble said, speaking on a GAO podcast.

He said he is confident his investigators could have altered the license again and again, allowing them to amass an even larger quantity. "It's a back door," he said in an interview. "We walked through it and we showed the door was still open. We could have kept doing it. If you can forge [a license] once, there's no reason you can't forge it again and again."

Texas nuclear regulatory officials have responded by quietly firing two managers and organizing new training efforts.

NRC Commissioner Jeff Baran, a lawyer and former House staff member, wrote a swift letter to the two other current NRC commissioners (two positions are vacant) stating that even if Texas changed its procedures, "GAO's covert testing identified a regulatory gap." He urged his colleagues to consider creating a system for tracking licenses and sales of low-level radioactive materials - an idea that its members rejected seven years ago under heavy state and industry pressure.

The GAO's July 15 report on the episode, which described the bare bones of its scam without naming any of the states involved or identifying the precise materials that were improperly ordered, similarly said that the NRC and state regulators aren't doing enough to keep such materials out of terrorists' hands.

It criticized the state regulator for granting the licenses, but also said the commission needs to act to block license alterations and track sales and shipments of lower-level radiological materials, using measures like those already in place for the sale of more hazardous fissile materials.

Unlike a nuclear detonation, which could destroy a large city, the explosion of a dirty bomb would provoke more chaos than immediate fatalities, according to a 2007 study commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security.

"A terrorist attack using a dirty bomb in the United States is possible, perhaps even moderately likely, but would not kill many people," two professors at the University of Southern California wrote in the study, which was conducted with advice from government scientific and counterintelligence experts. "Instead, such an attack primarily would result in economic and psychological consequences."

The explosion could be lethal to someone nearby or to the first emergency personnel to arrive. But cleaning up the contaminated area would cost billions of dollars and take about a year in the scenario examined by the study's authors - a dirty bomb targeting the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which together constitute the third-busiest in the world. At its worst, the resulting economic harm could exceed $250 billion.

Radioactive materials considered useful in a dirty bomb are widely present in U.S. and international commerce, used legitimately for medical and industrial purposes in more than 70,000 high-risk devices located at 13,000 buildings, according to a 2013 Energy Department estimate. These include machinery that irradiates food or blood products or is used to diagnose illness. In the United States alone, about 21,000 licenses for the purchase of these materials are active - and in some states they are reviewed by regulators only once a decade.

The Obama administration highlighted the dangers associated with loose radioactive materials at international summits in 2010, 2012, 2014 and this March. On March 31, President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes warned reporters at a media briefing that while terrorists would have a hard time building or stealing a working nuclear weapon and delivering it, making a "more rudimentary dirty bomb" would be less challenging.

The Obama administration's ambition in convening the summits, Rhodes said, was to "bring the standard up around the world so that it is at the level that we see certainly here in the United States."

The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative media organization in Washington.

Welcome to your discussion forum: Sign in with a Disqus account or your social networking account for your comment to be posted immediately, provided it meets the guidelines. (READ HOW.)
Comments made here are the sole responsibility of the person posting them; these comments do not reflect the opinion of The Sentinel and Enterprise. So keep it civil.